Judy: The Unforgettable Story of the Dog Who Went to War and Became a True Hero

by Damien Lewis

  At nine o’clock that night the Grasshopper threw off her moorings and headed for the open sea. She was in the company of her sister ship, the Dragonfly, plus a dockyard tugboat and two double-decker pleasure steamers. All five vessels were packed from stem to stern with evacuees. To the rear of the crowded Grasshopper Judy had found her special place. She was curled up with those who were most in need—the children who were being evacuated from the besieged island, which was being pounded into fiery oblivion even as they steamed out of Keppel Harbor.

  As the Grasshopper headed for the comparative safety of the darkened seas, the banshee howl of diving Japanese warplanes rent the air. The spine-chilling sound was punctuated by the scream of falling bombs and the earthshaking roar as they exploded among the port facilities. The occasional searchlight punched through the smoke-laden darkness as the defenders sought to nail a Japanese bomber in its light and put up some answering fire. But to those sailing away from Singapore the fate of the island fortress was plain to see.

  Come sunrise the flotilla was heading for the Berhala Strait. Dragonfly, under the captaincy of Commander Alfred Sprott, was leading. The sea was flat calm and the sky a cloudless blue, offering zero cover to hide from Japanese warplanes. To the south and east lay a myriad of tropical islands, and the ships’ commanders were hoping to find some respite from the Japanese naval forces by hiding among them.

  But the first developments that day proved darkly ominous. At around 0900 hours the distinctive form of a Japanese four-engine flying boat—a Kawanishi H8K, Allied code name Emily—appeared seemingly from out of nowhere. Powering along at her top speed of 465 kilometers per hour, the otherwise graceful warplane dived to attack the lead ship. Two bombs were dropped on Dragonfly, but both fell wide of the mark, after which the flying boat was driven off by machine-gun fire.

  Chiefly a maritime patrol aircraft, the H8K could carry around 1,000 kilograms of bombs, so it was good to have gotten rid of it. But no one doubted what this signified.

  They had to presume that their exact coordinates had been radioed through to the nearest Japanese forces, whether warships or warplanes.

  Chapter Eight

  Barely minutes after the flying boat had disappeared a series of deep explosions echoed across the seas as the first vessels to be attacked that morning were hit. Three little ships—Kuala, Kung Wo, and Tien Kwang—had come under attack.

  A group of small islands lay between their location and that of the Dragonfly and Grasshopper, and so no one aboard the British gunboats could see exactly what was happening. But they could hear that vessels were being set upon by Japanese warplanes and that they were being bombed and strafed from the air.

  Earlier that morning Kuala, Kung Wo, and Tien Kwang had pulled into the cover of the nearby Pompong Island, so luckily some of the crew had gone ashore, searching for material with which to camouflage their vessels. They at least would survive the bombing and sinking of the three ships. One of those survivors was a young Royal Air Force technician called Frank Williams. Unknown to him, his fate was tied up inextricably with a very special crew member aboard the Grasshopper—a ship’s dog that was even now comforting the children as the terrifying sound of explosions and gunfire echoed across the early morning seas.

  The Grasshopper and her sister ships were following a “safe channel” leading south, one that was supposed to have been swept clear of mines. That channel extended through the Berhala and Bangka straits, leading into the more open waters of the Java Sea beyond. Unfortunately, it was exactly via this route that the Japanese invasion fleet had chosen to approach the doomed island of Singapore.

  Ahead of the Grasshopper and Dragonfly, the first vessel to encounter the oncoming armada was the tiny gunboat HMS Li Wo, commanded by Royal Navy Lieutenant Wilkinson. The Li Wo found herself sandwiched between two rows of a massive Japanese naval force, each consisting of transport vessels, led by a cruiser and tailed by a destroyer.

  Undaunted, the captain ordered his ship to close to within 2,000 yards of the nearest enemy transport ship and open fire. The third salvo from the Li Wo’s single 4-inch gun hit just below the bridge and set the enemy vessel on fire, but by now the Japanese had very much woken up to the attack.

  With the damaged ship now very close at hand, Lieutenant Wilkinson ordered his vessel to ram her. This she did, hitting at top speed amidships, and the two craft became locked in their death throes. Battle commenced at close quarters. It was brutal and ferocious as each crew raked the other’s vessel with machine-gun fire. The British gunners finally silenced their rivals, forcing the Japanese to abandon their ship, which was burning fiercely.

  The Li Wo backed out of the hole she’d torn in the side of the vessel, but by now she had a Japanese cruiser in hot pursuit. Facing a barrage of fire from her 6-inch guns, the Li Wo kept zigzagging to avoid being hit. But after the ninth salvo had raked her with shrapnel the order was given to abandon ship. Shortly thereafter the aft magazine must have been hit, causing a cataclysmic explosion.

  The Li Wo went down with the captain, Lieutenant Wilkinson, still on the bridge, and there would be few if any survivors. For his heroic actions in command of his tiny vessel—outnumbered and outgunned but defiant to the last—Lieutenant Wilkinson would be posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross.

  Less than a mile away another of the little ships, the Vyner Brooke, commanded by Royal Navy Lieutenant Burton, was the next to be attacked. After two direct hits she too was sent beneath the waves. Scores of survivors, including several dozen Australian nurses, managed to reach the safety of nearby Bangka Island, only to be captured by a Japanese shore patrol. The men were marched out of sight of the nurses and bayoneted to death or beheaded in the jungle. The women were very likely raped before being driven into the sea and machine-gunned in the water.

  Several dozen miles to the north of Bangka Island, the Grasshopper and the Dragonfly were heading toward this bloody, tortured patch of ocean, along with three little ships packed with civilian evacuees—the two pleasure steamers and the tugboat. And it would be Judy who would first realize that the enemy was all but upon them.

  The first hint of the approaching danger came via the Grasshopper’s informal early-warning system. All of a sudden Judy sat bolt upright. One moment she had been playing with the children, the next her ears were pricked forward and she was frozen as only a pointer can be—limbs tense, eyes glued to the distant horizon, mind totally focused on her sense of hearing.

  Seconds later she had abandoned her position and was making a mad dash for the ship’s bridge. She was barking out a warning even as she flew up the iron steps, arriving at the feet of the ship’s captain, Commander Hoffman, breathless and panting. The captain was about to order her below again, but he and Petty Officer White—Mickey the monkey’s erstwhile nemesis—watched with a growing sense of alarm as Judy’s all too familiar actions began to unfold.

  She set her sleek muzzle to skies to the north and let out a long series of fierce barks, and there was zero sign of her stopping. Knowing what this must signify, the captain ordered his men to battle stations. Sure enough, as Judy’s barking rose to a frenzied and staccato ruff-ruff-ruff-ruff-ruff, the first tiny speck appeared on the distant burning blue. It was still inaudible to the human ear; it was only the sunlight glinting off distant wings that revealed it to be not a seabird but a warplane.

  This was no lone flying-boat reconnaissance aircraft. As the air armada bore down on them, those on the Grasshopper’s bridge counted well over 100 bombers flying in five separate formations. During the long weeks spent under bombardment first on the Yangtze and more recently in Singapore, the ship’s crew had grown used to the sight of mass waves of enemy aircraft roaring through the skies. But to encounter them here in the open ocean, and with hundreds of civilian passengers under their protection, was an entirely more daunting proposition.

  The Japanese warplanes were sleek twin-engine Mitsubishi Ki-21 heavy bombers, each carrying over 1,000 kilograms of bombs.
It was approaching midday on February 14, 1942, when the first of those aircraft thundered in across the ocean to attack.

  The lead bombers swooped onto the flotilla’s flagship, HMS Dragonfly. As her machine guns and cannon sparked fiery defiance, the first of the bombs fell all around her like rain. The captain had his vessel going at full speed and circling in an avoiding action as his guns unleashed hell, and for long moments the warplanes seemed unable to hit her. But though the Grasshopper likewise had all guns blazing, she wasn’t to be so lucky.

  The first direct hit on the Grasshopper sent shrapnel pinging off her thick armored plating and ricocheting all around her superstructure, the explosion raking the bridge with burning hot shards of steel. Commander Hoffman was himself injured in the blast, suffering a deep gouge to his leg, and Petty Officer White’s right arm and hand were peppered with flying splinters of blasted metal.

  A fire had been sparked by the bomb, but the ship’s crew soon managed to get it under control. Yet even as they were doing so more Ki-21s howled in, their bombs plummeting toward the ship with banshee wails that sent a shiver up the spine. Towering gouts of white were thrown up all around the Grasshopper as she plowed onward through the firestorm. At times the vessel was all but invisible as a result of the wall of water churned up by the explosions.

  Grasshopper’s guns continued to spit defiance even though the gunners were half blinded by the plumes of spray. The tugboat and the two double-decker pleasure steamers were entirely defenseless—apart from the fire put up by the gunboats. Within minutes both pleasure steamers had come to a stop and were burning fiercely. The tugboat, which had taken a direct hit, had disappeared completely.

  For several minutes the Dragonfly seemed to lead a charmed life as none of the bombers appeared able to score a direct hit. Then a bomb must have exploded in her aft magazine—the ammunition store, set just to the rear of the bridge—or on the depth charges stored on deck. Even from over a half a mile away, which was the distance now separating the Dragonfly and the Grasshopper, the explosion seemed devastating.

  There was the blinding flash of the blast, and a roar like thunder rolled across the sea toward the Grasshopper. A massive plume of smoke and debris punched above the Dragonfly aft of the bridge. When visibility finally cleared, all that remained of the back half of the British warship was a mass of twisted and scorched metal. Any evacuees who’d been sheltering in the rear half of the vessel would have been killed instantly. The stern of the Dragonfly seemed to have been torn clean away, the engines had stopped, and the ship looked doomed.

  As those in the Grasshopper watched aghast the Dragonfly began to sink stern first. Within a matter of minutes she was half submerged. The survivors launched a whaler, plus some circular Carley survival rafts, and the injured who could be rescued were hauled aboard. It was then that Commander Sprott gave the final order to abandon ship, and all those who were able to dived overboard and swam away from the fast-sinking vessel.

  Just as she was going under, two tiny figures jumped from the bridge, ran along her side, and slid down the ship’s bottom and into the sea. Commander Sprott and his first lieutenant had made it off the Dragonfly in the nick of time. Within seconds she was all but gone, just a few feet of her prow remaining above the waves. It was no more than five minutes since the cataclysmic explosion had torn her apart—and HMS Dragonfly was no more.

  The few dozen survivors were clinging to Carley floats or were packed into the lone lifeboat. They were a dozen miles or more from the nearest land and crammed into hopelessly overcrowded vessels. On the bridge of the Grasshopper, Commander Hoffman made the only decision that he could. He turned his vessel toward the point where the Dragonfly had gone down, and with the engines at full throttle he set a course for rescue. If he could also go to the aid of the survivors from the two pleasure steamers, so much the better.

  But the circling warplanes were far from finished yet. As Judy pranced about barking maniacally at the thundering skies, some sixty-odd enemy aircraft turned in formation and began to bear down on the lone surviving gunboat. They separated into flights of six aircraft each and dropped down to 2,000 feet, wave after wave lining up for a low-level attack designed to finish the stubborn British gunboat once and for all.

  For the umpteenth time that morning Commander Hoffman ordered his gunners to open fire, and Grasshopper’s six .303-inch machine guns spit defiance into the face of the attacking bombers. By now Judy had gotten used to the sound of the ship’s guns. She clearly didn’t like it, but as her hackles rose and she bared her fangs at the skies above the ship, it was clear that she knew from where the real danger emanated.

  From the Grasshopper’s bridge the scene appeared almost unreal. Judy’s barking mingled with the cries of the women and children crowded onto the decks, the distant jungle-clad “paradise” islands adding a surreal edge to the scene. If anything, the first few minutes of the onslaught proved even more surreal: repeated waves of Ki-21s screamed overhead as the Grasshopper charged onward at seventeen knots, churning up the seas in a series of tight circles, yet each time their bombs somehow seemed to miss her.

  With each revolution that his ship cut through the water, Commander Hoffman was bringing her ever closer to the nearest landfall. If she was hit, as he feared she was going to be, he wanted to be close to land to have a chance of saving his crew and those civilians who were crouched in terror on his decks.

  It was then that one of the Japanese warplanes must have gotten lucky. A sleek black object seemed to plummet in slow motion directly toward the bridge. At the last moment it overshot and slammed into the rear mess deck, just aft of the ship’s superstructure. It exploded in the bowels of the vessel, wreaking havoc in the after mess deck, the blast shaking the ship like a dog with a bone.

  The Grasshopper shuddered from stem to stern, but so far the damage didn’t appear terminal. It was only when angry gouts of flame burst forth from the ship’s hold adjacent to the rear magazine—the ship’s ammunition store—that Commander Hoffman knew they were in trouble. With the fire burning furiously, the crew struggled to flood the magazine with seawater to prevent it from exploding, but it proved impossible. Word was sent to the bridge that nothing could be done to stop the flames from reaching the ammunition, which could blow at any time.

  Commander Hoffman knew now that he had to get everyone off his ship and fast. If the fire reached the ammunition store, they would suffer a similar fate to that of the Dragonfly—the rear of their vessel would be blasted asunder. Injured though he was, Captain Hoffman was still very much in charge of his ship. With her bows pointed directly at the pristine white sands of the nearby tropical island, he demanded one final burst of power from her twin engines.

  Her bow cleaving the water like a knife, Grasshopper made her final, desperate run. There was little time for any finesse here: with further waves of Japanese warplanes thundering in to attack, Commander Hoffman planned to ram his ship into the shallows and beach her. As the engine room began to flood, the stokers coaxed the last remaining power from her boilers. Turbines throbbed, the deck thrummed, and Grasshopper’s twin propellers thrashed the seas as a long plume of oily smoke streamed out into the skies behind her, acting like a marker signal to the approaching Ki-21 warplanes.

  Twice more they dropped their bombs all around the stricken gunboat as she steamed hell for leather for land. Miraculously, none of those munitions found their mark. Finally, there was a tearing, shuddering impact from the bowels of the vessel, and the Grasshopper came to a halt, stuck fast on the bottom. The pristine white sands were barely a hundred yards distant, which should have made it easy enough to ferry the wounded and the survivors—both human and canine—to shore.

  The captain gave the order to abandon ship. As the Grasshopper’s crew dashed about manically, launching Carley floats and lifeboats and hurrying the terrified women and children into them, the one consolation seemed to be that the skies above them had fallen mercifully silent. As quickly as it had mate
rialized the Japanese air armada had disappeared: most likely they were all out of bombs. But even now a new and terrible drama was about to unfold around the wreckage of their sister ship, the Dragonfly.

  The Dragonfly’s one lifeboat was hopelessly overcrowded—so much so that those aboard had had to refuse to take any more survivors. The Carley floats were likewise swamped, and those small groups still in the sea had no option but to start the long swim to land. But some thirty minutes after the last of the Japanese warplanes had disappeared, a new threat heaved into view. Flying in from the east and at very low level was a second wave of warplanes.

  There were fewer Ki-21s this time, but there was also less work to be done. They broke into formations of three flying in line abreast and thundered in at close to zero feet above the waves. The first trio bore down on the Dragonfly’s single lifeboat and opened fire. Machine-gun rounds tore into the little vessel. A second and a third formation roared across the sea, likewise pounding the lifeboat mercilessly. With the tiny wooden craft having been riddled with gunfire, the Ki-21s turned their attention to those clinging to the Carley floats, plus any they could find in the water.

  Having shot up the survivors from the Dragonfly, the warplanes turned toward their one remaining target—the Grasshopper. By now the wounded and the women and children had been loaded aboard the ship’s lifeboat. Most of the crew was gathered around the Carley floats or had set off in groups swimming the short distance to shore. But Captain Hoffman and Petty Officer White remained on the bridge with vital work to do—directing the fire of the ship’s guns.

  Beached, broken, and burning she might be, but the Grasshopper still had fight in her. And it was vital that her six .303-inch machine guns keep firing until those making for the island had gotten into the cover of the thick jungle. With a sickening sense of anger and disgust, the crew of the Grasshopper, who had seen what those Japanese bombers had done to the survivors of the Dragonfly, was poised to meet murderous fire with fire.